Monday, July 14, 2014

Guest Post: Can boys write for girls who like girls?

Can we talk comfort zones for a minute?

As a writer I feel that if you’re not at
1,000 feet standing on the wing of your comfort zone and about to jump then
you’re not giving value to your readers. If someone shells out hard cash for
your book then they deserve something in return – and not just ink and paper
(or 0s and 1s if it’s digital).

That’s why I want to talk to you about F/F
as a genre in romantic fiction.

For my first book, His Secret Dancer, I
checked my safety net at the door and dived into transgender/cross dressing –
the world of ‘t-girls’. My hero/heroine was deeply conflicted about who he was
and explored his sexuality as both a boy and a girl with both a boy and a girl.
The challenge for me was to make Dan/Danielle’s emotional journey real and,
despite paddling my canoe up a creek that is still taboo to some, something that
readers cared about. Dan as Danielle was able to connect with his feminine side
to such an extent that I felt writing about girls who like girls would be an
even greater challenge.

So when I embarked upon my second book, As
Dreams Are Made On, I took the even riskier step of writing about two girls.

My starting point was Shakespeare’s play
‘The Tempest’ in which the young Miranda discovers love after living on an
island with just her father for twelve years from the age of three. A fifteen
year old may have been OK for Shakespeare but my Miranda is twenty one. She’s
also marooned on a planet far in the future rather than on an island in the
Mediterranean. She has read extensively of love and passion but wants to know
the real thing. My Ferdinand became Captain Jane Ferdinand, an older and more experienced
star ship captain for whom love has often been (star)ships passing in the
night.

That’s the challenge; could I, as a man,
write a convincing relationship between two women? Could I really connect with
Miranda’s emotions as she discovers her sexuality? Could I convey Ferdinand’s
need for true love?

And that’s the point of F/F romance – for
me there is an intensity of emotion between women that doesn’t have a parallel
in M/F or M/M. Women feel more deeply, and care more about the awakening of
emotions in a relationship. There is less dependency on the physical and more
exploration of the emotional, the striving for the sensual, the connection
between two people – hearts and minds meeting. That means there is also so much
more room for conflict and the journey to resolution.

Men may be from Mars and women from Venus
but the god of war falls far short of the target when it comes to the travails
of true love, especially when the lovers have the full feminine depth of
emotion to try to keep afloat in, as well as searching for a connection on a
level that, while it may explore it, seeks to transcend the physical.

"I
am a woman, Miranda. Flesh and blood. The same as you."

Miranda
breathed in slowly, her gaze flitting from Ferdinand's eyes to her lips.

"Yes.
Yes. You are. Captain, kiss me again."

My comfort zone is in tatters on the floor
these days. I hope that as a writer I can take my readers at least to the edge
of their comfort zone. That place, I feel, is in F/F romance. I hope you think
so too.

A stricken starship, a captain lost in
space; a beautiful alien girl, marooned and adrift in time; the perfect robotic
servant. Can he help them come together and find the space and time for love?

Her starship, Prospero, out of control and
hurtling toward an uncharted world, Captain Jane Ferdinand takes to the escape
pods. Finding herself alone on an island, the last thing she expects to find is
love.

Miranda,
marooned since a baby with only her father, Jacques-Pierre, and their
ultra-adaptable android servant, R.E.L, spends her time exploring her father's
books and dreaming of love. And on a night when a mysterious shooting star flashes
across the horizon, she finally makes full use of R.E.L.'s adaptability to
explore her emerging

desires—desires that, with gentle guidance
from Captain Ferdinand, help her discover her awakening sexuality.

But can her dreams and their love survive
when R.E.L.'s gender adaptability threatens to come between them and Captain
Ferdinand uncovers the secret that her father has kept from Miranda for twenty
years?

Faberge Nostromo's career has been one in
the true sense of the word - "move swiftly and in an uncontrolled
way"; expelled from school, he finally arrived, through fortuosity and
belligerence, at a stage in life where he can genuinely claim to be a writer
and musician. Whatever you do, do not encourage him.